MAMET ON MAMET: POLITICS AND POETICS IN OLEANNA, RACE, THE ANARCHIST, AND ...

63 Pages·2016·0.3 MB·English

MAMET ON MAMET: POLITICS AND POETICS IN OLEANNA, RACE, THE
ANARCHIST, AND CHINA DOLL

A THESIS IN
Theatre

Presented to the Faculty of the University
of Missouri-Kansas City in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree

MASTER OF ARTS

by
JAMES MICHAEL ALDERISO
B.A., Wilkes University, 2014

Kansas City, Missouri
2016
© 2016

JAMES MICHAEL ALDERISO

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
MAMET ON MAMET: POLITICS AND POETICS IN OLEANNA, RACE, THE
ANARCHIST, AND CHINA DOLL

James Michael Alderiso, Candidate for the Master of Arts Degree
University of Missouri-Kansas City, 2016

ABSTRACT

Mamet on Mamet: Politics and Poetics in Oleanna, Race, The Anarchist, and
China Doll” aims to illuminate Mamet’s mature aesthetic through a close examination of
four of his later plays. The thesis blends textual examinations of the plays with reporting
on major, commercial productions of them. The combination of the two modes yields
insights about current perceptions of David Mamet’s place in the American theatre. In
every chapter, Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture
(2011)—a work of nonfiction by the playwright—is referenced to further highlight the
themes of the play and the playwright. However, the first chapter “David Mamet and the
Eight Selling Playwrights of the Twenty-first Century” is an introductory chapter that
establishes Mamet’s canonical status in the theatre, within the pantheon of playwrights
who are commercially reliable. The final chapter “Lions in Winter: China Doll” follows
iii
the format of the middle chapters, except for the primary account of attending the world
premiere of the play at the Gerald Shoenfeld Theatre on Broadway in New York.

iv
APPROVAL PAGE

The faculty listed below, appointed by the Dean of the Colleges of Arts and
Sciences have examined a thesis titled “Mamet On Mamet: Politics and Poetics in
Oleanna, Race, The Anarchist, and China Doll” presented by James Michael Alderiso,
candidate for the Master of Arts degree, and certify that in their opinion it is worthy of
praise.

Supervisory Committee:

Felicia Hardison Londré, Ph. D., Committee Chair
Department of Theatre

Frank Higgins
Department of Theatre

Theodore Swetz
Department of Theatre

v
CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iii

Chapter

1. THE EIGHT SELLING PLAYWRIGHTS AND DAVID MAMET ......................1

2. DESIRES IN THE UNIVERSITY: OLEANNA ......................................................7

3. GLADIATORS IN THE COURTROOM: RACE .................................................15

4. WORDS IN THE OFFICE: THE ANARCHIST ....................................................29

5. LIONS IN WINTER: CHINA DOLL .....................................................................42

6. EPILOGUE ............................................................................................................54

WORKS CITED ................................................................................................................55

VITA ..................................................................................................................................57

vi
CHAPTER 1

THE EIGHT SELLING PLAYWRIGHTS AND DAVID MAMET

David Mamet sells. He is an indisputable member of the dramatic American
canon, and he is also commercially enticing. Now more than halfway through the second
decade of the twenty-first century, he is one of the most produced playwrights in the
commercial theatre of New York. Indeed, Mamet ranks along with six other masters in a
group I will be calling The Eight Selling Playwrights of the Twenty-First Century. The
qualifications for successful admittance to my club: a playwright (dead or alive) must be
able to report six different Broadway productions of his work since January 2000. Only
eight playwrights gained admittance. Here are their names in alphabetical order: Noël
Coward, David Mamet, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, Harold Pinter, William
Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, and August Wilson. These names epitomize the
“commercial” tastes of play-going in the early part of the century. The names also reveal
what is safe and what is marketable. These are the authors the public is willing to pay for
again and again. It is a shame that we only have one living member of this club still
writing.
Let us take some time to analyze the makeup of these eight men. Seven of them
belong to the twentieth century, while Shakespeare sits between the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries. Five are indisputable Americans, whereas Coward, Pinter,
and Shakespeare hail from Mother England. Seven are white, August Wilson is black.
None are women. Regarding the subject of religion and faith: three are definitely Jewish,
we know of one one lapsed Catholic, a Renaissance Christian, a disciple of blues and
1
jazz, an end-of-days Roman Catholic convert, and an aesthete of culture and
sophistication. We know five were reportedly heterosexual, two were gay, while the
remaining wrote sonnets to both sexes. Two are Nobel Laureates. Five are Pulitzer Prize
winners. Seven of the eight were contemporaries of one another. All have written
indisputable classics of dramatic literature.
These names are a revealing look at the writers transposing the most of their
voices in the twenty-first century; each singular voice still speaks to audience members of
the twenty-first century. They have power, much of which comes from their universally
accepted literary merit, but also through their ability to sell tickets. Producers have
banked on these names numerous times in the early part of the twenty-first century, and
one can also see this also through regional theatre seasons as well. For instance, one
needs to only go back to the 2008-2009 season at the Kansas City Repertory Theatre to
find productions of five of the men’s work, the three missing being Nöel Coward, Eugene
O’Neill and Harold Pinter.
These eight men have titles that theatres across the country can bank on. They are
able to exist outside of academic theatre. They represent purchasing power through the
test of time, the only true legitimizer of canonical belonging. Indeed, for time cares little
about cultural wars, revolution, disease, or literacy rates; time will just pass. Time brings
with it tangible proof of competence. Essentially, time slices through the trendy fashions
to legitimize the durability of an eternal idea or genius.
More frank discussion should occur about deciphering whether or not a work is
eternally durable. I will always be interested in how works of art become classics in their
own respected fields. One thing remains for sure: every single generation is responsible
2
for continuing the lineage; every generation has the power to delegitimize or reaffirm a
play. A generation commits these decisions when it finally has the purchasing power to
decide what sort of plays are worth doing repeatedly.
People who are not on the list: no writer of the avant-garde and no representative
of the Theatre of the Absurd—I refute Martin Esslin who considers Pinter an absurdist, a
categorization that now seems both anachronistic and anti-geographical, tied to Paris in
the 1950s. There is no nineteenth-century master, no seventeenth or eighteenth century
comedy of sexual conquests, no Shakespeare contemporary, and certainly no winner from
the City Dionysia. Why are they not as reliable for an early twenty-first century
audience? My theory: these genres do not suit the tastes of the current purchasing power,
the Baby Boomers.
David Mamet, the only Baby Boomer on the list, is indeed a symbol for the
current state of American play-going. This is not to be confused with musical theatre-
going—the true breadwinner for the masses. It is a dreadful shame that we only have one
living playwright in this group, but this speaks for the current state of the art form.
Novelty and experimentation do not always sell. Who can guess which playwrights will
be the most frequently produced in the forthcoming decades!
The proceeding pages focus on the sole, living author of The Eight Selling
Playwrights: David Mamet. Each chapter of the work focuses on both historical and
textual readings of four of his most recent plays performed on Broadway—that is, four of
the six productions that gained him admittance to my club, The Eight Selling Playwrights
of the Twenty-first Century. These are the productions that have gained Mamet
admittance in chronological order: the 2009 Broadway revival of Oleanna, the original
3
production of Race (2010), the 2010 production of A Life in the Theatre (1977), the
original production of The Anarchist (2012), the 2012 revival of Glengarry Glenn Ross
(1983), and the original production of Mamet’s most recent play, China Doll (2015). I
will be focusing on Oleanna, Race, The Anarchist, and China Doll. The latter three works
were all performed on Broadway in the decade of the 2010s and were all written during
the Obama administration. I have chosen to omit Glengarry Glen Ross and A Life in the
Theatre because there is already an wealth of scholarship on the play that earned Mamet
his Pulitzer, and A Life in the Theatre simply does not interest me as much as his most
recent dramatic offerings.
Through this work, I make no apologies for refusing to separate Mamet’s personal
writings and public personality with my readings of his work. I align myself with
dissident feminist and cultural-provocateur, Camille Paglia. She writes in her seminal
1990 tome, Sexual Personae, “Behind every book is a certain person with a certain
history. I can never know too much about that person and that history. Personality is
western reality” (Paglia 34). The days of a text existing completely apart from an author
should long be over. That might serve the functionality of mounting a production, but it
does little to advance literary and historical scholarship in the ongoing twenty-first
century. The dead-end corridor of post-structuralism must be called out for what it is: a
turgid, word-obsessed, and reductive set of processes that has given way to a critical
landscape of grievance-based writing and a misplaced reverence for heroic victimhood. I
again wholeheartedly return to Paglia’s call-to-critics, now over a quarter of a century
old. She writes with both anger and resolve, “The humanities must abandon their insular
fiefdoms and begin thinking in terms of imagination, a power that crosses the genres and
4